“‘It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.’ This is one of the most eloquent nihilistic speeches of all time. Macbeth no longer has anything to live for; time itself is empty, void of hope or regret, merely an objective succession of moments. Macbeth experiences the narrative of …
Providence and Evil
“No merciful and provident God speaks through the signs and symbols. In the modern world of Seven, God is effectively dead. The loss of that authoritative voice is not a liberation but an enslavement to new forms of tyranny. Without a providence to bring good out of evil, evil endless begets evil” [Thomas Hibbs, Shows …
Ideas Have Destinations
“Given the modern scientific understanding of human behavior in terms of natural laws, everything is determined by chemical reactions and evil arise solely from a miscalculation of the appropriate way of satisfying genetically determined inclinations. This the philosophy of progress; anyone who demurs is labeled irrational and sent for medical treatment. If one actually tries …
Evil, Be Thou My Good
“These forces are brought to fruition not so much in films of the horror genre itself as in more mainstream and critically acclaimed movies like Cape Fear and Silence of the Lambs (both 1991). These stories exalt the artistic boldness of their evil supermen, who put into question the timid mores of conventional society and …
Sneaking Standards Back In
“The need of most human beings to believe in a moral universe is proof for Nietzsche that lies and self-deception are essential conditions of human life . . . . But there is a tension in Nietzsche between an amoralism that repudiates all objective standards and a distinctively hierarchical kind of thinking that ranks souls …
No Brakes On Hip
“Aside from the settings and multiple victims, another common feature of these killings has been the influence on the perpetrators of films such as Natural Born Killers and Basketball Diaries, of fantasy video games, and of the nihilistic lyrics of Marilyn Manson . . . The pursuit of evil, then, can have a certain grandeur …
Where The Action Is
“It is a truism of the business world that Coke and Pepsi don’t make soda pop, they make advertising. Nike may pay Indonesian laborers absurdly low wages, but their most important concern is convincing us that it is meaningful, daring, and fulfilling to spend over one hundred dollars for a pair of sneakers. If you …
Alternating Alternative
“Thus with the ‘alternative’ face lift, ‘rebellion’ continues to perform its traditional function of justifying the economy’s ever-accelerating cycles of obsolescence with admirable efficiency . . . Ever since the 1960s hip has been the native tongue of advertising, ‘antiestablishment’ the vocabulary by which we are taught to cast off our old possessions and buy …
Social Totemization
“Brands are also a handy device for papering over nasty ambiguities like how things are made and what product is ‘right’ for a person’s socioeconomic standing and lifestyle. This strategy has been taken to ridiculous extremes, as in the case of sunglasses, hiking shoes, water, beer, and countless other cases where the most everyday products …
What Television Sees
“They were both aspects of the advertised life, an emerging mode of being in which advertising not only occupies every last negotiable public terrain, but in which it penetrates the cognitive process, invading consciousness to such a point that one expects and looks for advertising, learns to lead life as an ad, to think like …